This Awesome Periodic Table Tells you How to Actually Use all Those Elements

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Thanks
to high school, we’ve all got a pretty good idea about what’s on the periodic
table. But
whether you’re looking at something common like calcium, iron, and carbon, or
something more obscure like krypton and antimony, how well do you know their
functions? Could you name just one practical application for vanadium or
ruthenium?

Lucky
for us, Keith Enevoldsen from elements.wlonk.com has
come up with this
awesome periodic table that gives you at least one example for every
single element (except for those weird superheavy elements that don’t actually
exist in nature). There’s thulium for laser eye surgery, cerium for lighter
flints, and krypton for flashlights. You’ve got strontium for fireworks, and
xenon for high-intensity lamps inside lighthouses.

First
unveiled in 1945 during the Manhattan Project, americium
is produced by bombarding plutonium with neutrons in a nuclear reactor. The
resulting americium is radioactive, and while the tiny amounts of americium
dioxide (AmO2) used in smoke detector produces alpha radiation to
sniff out a fire, it will deliver approximately
zero radiation to anyone living nearby.

You can also
download the PDF if you’ve got a class to teach, or maybe you just
want to be great and put it on your bathroom door. And if this whole exercise
has made you realise just how rusty you’ve become with your science basics,
check out AsapSCIENCE’s Periodic
Table Song below.

We’d
like to see a better way of memorising the periodic table - it's even got the
four brand new elements that earned a permanent spot in the seventh row back
in January (which unfortunately have no cool uses outside of atomic research).